Starting off as a physicist, Axel studied physics and math at
Muenster, Germany. In 2000, he got a PhD position for high energy
physics at Nijmegen, The Netherlands. They sent him to Fermilab at
Chicago, where he worked with the D0 experiment - which also meant
writing software from PCI drivers to data analysis code. During that
time he got involved with ROOT, slowly converting from a user to a
developer. He contributed to whatever he needed, e.g. the statistics
part, the documentation engine, and porting it to cygwin. After a
position with the Fermilab Computing Division in 2005 he ended up at
CERN in the ROOT development team. He is now responsible for the
reflection system, the interpreter CINT, and the documentation
system.